“I talked to Mom and Dad,” Charlotte continued. “I’m just waiting to hear whether they want to admit me tonight, and if they do, they’ll probably do the C-section in the morning.”
“Are Mom and Dad coming?”
“Of course they’re coming. If they need to. These are their first grandchildren.”
“I know—”
“I thought you might come up here with them. I don’t want to assume anything, though. I know how busy you’ve been.”
Knox tugged again at her bra strap. She could feel herself flushing.
“Are you being sarcastic?” she said, the words escaping her lips even though Knox knew better than to let them.
“No. Knox. You said you’d been busy.” Charlotte sighed with audible exasperation. “Right?”
“I’m sorry.”
“You’re getting weird. I’m in the hospital. Are you actually arguing with me right now?”
“I’m sorry, I misheard. No need to be dramatic.”
“It is dramatic.”
“Okay.”
Charlotte paused. “Anyway. Talk to Mom and Dad. Let them know what you want to do. I just wanted to speak to you myself while I still had a chance.” The speed and breath that had animated Charlotte’s voice moments ago seemed spent. Knox swallowed, casting about in her mind for the right thing to say, the calm, conciliatory thing, but she and Charlotte had long ago stopped practicing the skills required to wrest a moment like this back. How could Knox make it not matter, conjure the lightness necessary for them to laugh it off, forget any misunderstanding had occurred? With Ned, or Marlene, or her parents, she would know without thinking.
“I will,” she said. “Of course.”
The words I got proposed to for the fourth time last night scrolled across Knox’s consciousness, unbidden. There seemed to be a million reasons not to tell Charlotte something like this in order to rescue their conversation, distract Charlotte with an entertainment of some kind, and at the same time there wasn’t any one in particular that she could point to. She opened her fingers and shuffled forward until the cord on her anachronistic dial phone stretched as far as it would go, then began to turn, wrapping herself up. It was strange; Knox remembered Charlotte parting the cheeks of her own ass so her sister could peer into the dark space contained there—God, they must have been bored that afternoon—and yet Knox felt inhibited about revealing the starkest facts of her life to her, things she might sputter to a stranger in the grocery store if she were the type to sputter. They rarely spoke about Ned, and when they did, Knox felt protective of every word, vetting it before it emerged, keeping her explanations neutral. They’d been forced by accident of birth into mutual territory, and yet emerged, Knox thought now, as if they’d been raised in separate countries.
“Good luck,” Knox said. “Really. I’m just absorbing. It’s taking me a moment.”
Charlotte cleared her throat.
“Thanks.”
“Please let me know what’s happening, all right? I’ll see you soon if this is really happening. I love you,” Knox said.
“Love you, too.”
They said their goodbyes. Knox unwound herself and put the phone receiver in its cradle. She stared at the wall in front of her, a pocket of sweat forming above her upper lip. She had hung a picture on that wall, but the wood was so old and mealy that the nail had never held, and she’d finally given up and twisted it free. She squinted, trying unsuccessfully to locate a hole in the grain. She felt emptied out, as if something had been exacted of her. Marlene would say she was jealous. She would blow smoke as she sighed, thus giving her pity, her wisdom, a visible shape. She would call Knox hon, a form of address so predictable that it was actually surprising. Marlene would be the perfect Marlene, puff hon then press her lips together, surely thinking that Knox wanted the life Charlotte had, with a worried husband and all the attention and babies and planes on the way. That was the problem, Marlene would say. Though, of course, Marlene couldn’t be more wrong in that department.
FOUR CORNERS FARM, stallion division: fourteen studs, breeding shed, vet lab. Barns with beams hewed and heaved into place by Amish carpenters. Prep-house where mares-to-be-bred were given their glimpse of teaser (overweight, burr-plagued Pinto, butt of the grooms’ crudest jokes) through a sliding window—to be vanned home if they bared teeth, to be declared in season and walked into the circular breeding shed if they spread their haunches a little or didn’t react. Exercise track. Broodmares housed in three separate